Social Media

January 30th is International Delete Your MySpace Account Day

We were just recently alerted here at Mashable that January 30th, just a few scant days away, is International Delete Your MySpace Account Day. Cory Geller sent us to a blog post by Simon Owens describing his growing disgust with the constant friend requests from the fembots and the the anonymous birthday announcements, not to mention spam wrapped in a riddle, wrapped in banner ads.

2. You spend five minutes writing a wall post only to hit an error message when you try to post it because of all the website glitches.

3. You’re a girl who constantly gets marriage proposals from random men in the middle east.

4. You visit someone’s Myspace profile only to suddenly have music start blasting out of your speakers. Bonus points if it happens to you while you’re at work.

5. You have to make redundant clicks to perform simple tasks because Myspace keeps taking you to advertisement pages where you have to click on “return to myspace profile” in order to continue what you’re doing.

6. You visit someone’s profile only to have your eyes bleed because of terrible page layout with non-matching designs and font colors.

7. Your experience is hindered because of intrusive banner ads that either talk to you or try to reach out and block your view of what you’re trying to look at.

8. You read yet another news account about how some child predator using Myspace has abducted a little girl or that some hoax myspace account has caused a teenager to commit suicide.

9. You’re frustrated with the fact that Myspace doesn’t allow you to post your contact info, meaning to contact someone you can only use Myspace’s glitchy Instant Messenger, message/email system, or wall commenting.

10. You’re tired of seeing Tom stare out at you from millions of friends lists and just wish he would change his fucking profile picture.

Finally, reaching a breaking point, he made the decision to nuke his MySpace account. Instead of immediately deleting it, he wanted to set an end-date that others could join him in his effort of January 30th, perhaps sending more of a message to MySpace rather than going quietly into the night.

Personally, even though I experience most of the same things that Simon says he goes through with MySpace, many of the folks in my less tech savvy circles of friends use MySpace exclusively. For me to nuke that account would be the same as deleting my contact database. I don't know that I could personally join Simon in his campaign to end his MySpace involvement, but I can definitely see the motivation.

I am reminded of another startup that would be perfectly suited to giving MySpace the message to shape up or ship out: The Point (see the Mashable Conversations podcast from the week before Christmas). Sure, a Facebook group could be started for something like this (I'm sure there will be one or two petition groups up within a few minutes of this post going live). ThePoint, the way it works, is a conditional petition. That is to say, in the example of this situation, if 10,000 people agree to delete their MySpace account, the whole group has to follow through and do it. If the tipping point isn't reached, then it won't happen for anyone.

If I had a virtual guarantee that most if not all my MySpace buddies were moving over to an alternative like Facebook, I'd be more apt to do it. ThePoint would increase the likelyhood of that happening.

I'm going to have to ponder whether MySpace (or Facebook for that matter) is indeed the best walled garden for my profile data to sit in. They do provide an element of convenience for tracking people down you need to talk to. On the other hand, it is getting increasingly difficult to squeeze out usability between the multiple layers of excruciating monetization they try to throw into their systems.

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